


It's Only Fair (That I Should Be The One To Chase You)

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Endverse, M/M, One Shot, POV Castiel, Perdition, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Theology, Unrequited Love, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-09 00:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1139406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the many times Castiel knew Dean Winchester, and the one time Dean knew him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Only Fair (That I Should Be The One To Chase You)

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by "25 Lives" by Tongari on Livejournal.
> 
>  
> 
> maybe spoilers for season 4 - endverse

  
_"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit._   
_"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt."_   
_"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"_   
_"It doesn’t happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand."_   


-Margery Williams, 'The Velveteen Rabbit'

 

\---

I.

 

The first time I knew you, you were spread out with more wounds than skin, tied to eternity by barbed wire and hooks. All of your blood and bones were on your outside and nothing was left of you inside. You were pain and you were rage and you were your brother's name. That was all.

The second time I knew you I forgot to be gentle and you forgot how to handle the sound of my voice. You could no longer hold it in your fragile human hands the way you had in Perdition, and I could no longer hold you as fiercely as I had when i brought you out. Although the last time, I held onto all of you tighter than I had ever (needed) been ordered to hold anything in all my existence; we were in Hell, and desperate strength was necessary to keep the torn-apart and disembodied fragments of your soul together.  
I (loved)(needed) feared for each broken thread.

The third time I knew you I remembered to be gentle. Gentle and small. Still, you looked at me like you had never survived the flight from Hell suffused with my Grace, never felt it wrap you up tight and tie you back together as you told me with your screams that you were grateful. It took much strength not to try and remind you, especially when your stare turned from fearful to angry to wary and never once flickered into relief. You needed so much to be relieved.

I knew you from every atom that held you together and every thought that pulled you apart. I knew you and I loved you and I couldn't tell you that I did because you were not ready to comprehend the immeasurability of just how much it was that I loved you.

You knew me slowly, like a child stepping cautiously into strange waters. You did not know that once before, you had dived in headfirst, burning and thirsty, and I had swallowed you up and you had breathed me in and you had loved me, possibly as much as I loved you. Neither of us could understand how the other could pour out so much love in such a soulless place.

 

\---

II.

 

Days, months, years pass, and now I think you are beginning to know me again. I can see in your eyes the same pneuma that surged and intertwined with my Grace when I lifted you - I do not think you are ready to know what it means this time. I will not ask you if I am right about your eyes. I am afraid to know too.  
Stars die, planets spin, galaxies implode, and I find it strange that I still come to know new parts of you each day. The love i feel for you is filling up the spaces left from when you were in agonizing bloody pieces, before I knew what you looked like bandaged up and put together. You are beautiful.  
You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Dean.

 

\---

III.

 

Time is healing you and it is tearing you new wounds, and you are still knowing me with a blind man's touch; learning and memorizing as much of me as I will give you (and some of what I try to hide). I am doing the same to you. Do you feel me?  
I know you are not secure with words, and so with my eyes and my actions and everything else I can use, I try to tell you. Do you hear me?

There are times when I wonder if eyes and actions and everything else aren't enough for you to know, because I keep catching you sending me shadows of messages. Sometimes I see them in the way you quirk your smile a little further when you know I am watching you, and sometimes I feel them in the warmth of your hand gripping my shoulder as you speak to me, and sometimes I taste them in the sky as you call out the name you have given me - Cas, separate from God, all my own.  
I want to tell you I get your messages, but they are flashes covered up by haste and flippancy and so I am never sure if you are trying to tell me or if I am just going insane with wanting you to.  
Either way, this kills me. I wonder if it kills you too.

 

\---

IV.

 

It is war and I do not know you anymore. The human race is dying and I have long since given up trying to understand them. You are still beautiful but you still do not know I think so. Either that, or you don't want to know. Your eyes might burn with that same desperate yearning I always reflected back at you, but now I am starting to forget what it is meant to look like and how to feel it. I have lived here as a human, and even though it was just to watch over you I found myself humanized along the way. I know now why you never stopped being broken. Humans fall, constantly. Every day you fall, and you are meant to pick yourself back up and carry on as if you never lost yourself in the first place.

It didn't take me long at all to be as battered as everyone else - Earth is bathed in pain.  
I think I am drowning here.

\---

Time has wounded us both, and now I have scar tissue like yours. And I am tired and I do not know how else to show you that I love you and now I do not think you want to know. Do you even know how to accept love? Did you ever, after Hell?  
You think you do not deserve to be seen and to be known and to be loved... but you do, Dean Winchester.  
You do.

The world is ending and I am remembering, with the sight of you, different with time and the same in how much I love you, that I will follow you into the dark. I can't remember how I was ever able to question that. Maybe I just learned, like you, how to forget the deepest pain. Perhaps my love for you was so strong, it created a sound so loud that it just gave up. I wonder if this is what it has always been like for you. You only know how to love so strongly that it breaks you, and you do not want to be broken anymore. I think i understand why now. I am sorry I tried to break you, Dean. I am so sorry.

 

\---

V.

 

It is the end and I want you to know that throughout everything, I never stopped fighting for you and I never stopped believing in you and I never stopped loving you. You forgot that, in Hell, during the concurrent eternity it took for me to find you and seize you, you and I formed a profound bond. You forgot (and that's okay), but I never did; and through all the times I knew you and you knew me, I never tried to break that bond. Even if I wanted to, I could never succeed. Through time and space and lack thereof, Dean Winchester... I will always love you.

I just wish that, this time, you were able to love me too.

~

 

/end.

 

\------


End file.
